Why are the Japanese Self-Defence Forces in Iraq?

Douglas Lummis

The Peace Constitution
Ignoring strong public protests, ignoring majority public opinion, ignoring the nation's Constitution, the Japanese government has dispatched Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to Iraq, the first time since World War II that armed Japanese troops have been sent into a war zone. This is an event that is likely to have profound reverberations in Japan, in Asia, and throughout the world.
Japan's Constitution, popularly called the Peace Constitution, has a clause renouncing war, threat of war, and preparation for war. Enacted in 1946, the Constitution was hated from the beginning by the right wing, but has been immensely popular among ordinary people, who had seen enough of war. Very soon after it was enacted the conservative government began trying to figure out how to change it, in particular the war-renouncing　Article 9. Unable to build public support for an amendment (which requires　approval by 2/3 of both houses of the Diet and by a majority of votes cast　in a national referendum) the government began a process that came to be　called "amendment by interpretation." This despite the fact that Article 9 is not written in such a way as to lend itself to more than one interpretation. It reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of thenation and the threat or use of force as means of settling internationaldisputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

In 1950, with Japan still under U.S. occupation, the government formed the "National Police Reserve," whose job would be to ensure domestic security while the U.S. occupation troops were off fighting in Korea. This was the seed from which the present SDF grew (lending support to the theory that the primary "defensive" function of state military organizations is the defense of the state against the people). Since then, little by little Article 9 has been whittled away by "interpretation": Article 9 means only that Japan should not engage in aggressive war; military action in self-defense is an inherent right of the state, which cannot be abrogated. Article 9 means that the SDF can not be sent abroad; well, except that they can be sent to foreign ports on goodwill missions. Article 9 means the SDF can have only defensive weapons; well, except that everybody knows that the most effective defense is attack. Article 9 means military expenditures should not go over 1% of the national income (how they managed to squeeze that meaning out of the words remains a mystery); especially in the bubble years this allowed for vast increases. Article 9 means the country should try to promote peace; thus it positively supports the dispatch of SDF troops abroad as U.N. peacekeepers. Or, as the present Prime Minister has argued, it positively supports the dispatch of SDF troops to Iraq to participate in the "peace-restoring" occupation of that country.

The Right of Belligerency
What all these sophistries and vagaries ignore is the last sentence of Article 9: "The right of belligerency of the state shall not be recognized." The government has tried (and fairly well succeeded) to convince the people that the right of belligerency means the right to carry out aggressive war, so that even if this right is abrogated, the right of self-defense remains. However, that's not what it means. In the first place, under postwar international law, there is no such thing as "the right to carry out aggressive war." Aggressive war was outlawed by the Charter of the United Nations, and at the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials men were given death sentences for planning and carrying out aggressive war. So if that's all Article 9 says, it says nothing. But the right of belligerency is not the right of aggression. It is the right to carry out military action at all. That is, it is the right to kill people in war, without being liable to punishment for murder. It is part of what sociologist Max Weber called the state's "right of legitimate violence". The state holds this right, but of course "the state" is an abstraction that can't exercise violence, so concretely it is the soldiers who are given the right to kill. It is this right that makes war possible as war, by distinguishing it from mass murder. And this is the right that Article 9 says the Japanese government doesn't have.

Article 9 is sometimes described as an ideal, a wish, a hope or a dream. It may be all of these, but first and foremost it is binding law. The Japanese Constitution sets out what powers the government has, and what powers it doesn't. If it says the government doesn't have the right of belligerency, then it doesn't, and that's all there is to it.

If so, then what are the SDF doing carrying pistols, rifles, machine guns, etc. in Iraq?

What are the SDF Doing in Iraq?
This is where the story becomes quite bizarre. In the legislation that (allegedly) enabled the SDF to go to Iraq there is a clause entitled "Use of Weapons." It states that except in cases that would be covered by Articles 36 and 37 of the Japanese Criminal Code, weapons may not be used to injure anyone. Articles 36 and 37 of the Criminal Code set out the right to use force in legitimate self-defense or for emergency rescue. These are rights held by anyone subject to the Criminal Code: if you are forced into a situation where there is no other way but to use violence to protect your life or the life of another, and you do, you will not be prosecuted for this. But this right of personal self - defense is utterly different from the right of belligerency, and cannot be used as a legal basis for military action. To give the simplest example: under the right of individual self-defense, if you have the option of saving yourself by running away, and choose instead to stay and fight, you cannot claim self-defense (especially in Japan, where the use of violence for self-defense is far more strictly limited than, for example, the United States). But you cannot have a military organization that is legally obligated to run away if by doing so it can protect the lives of its members.

So, to repeat the above question, what are the Japanese SDF troops doing carrying weapons around in war-torn Iraq?

First Blood
This is a serious question. The specific mission of the SDF there is said to have to do with repair of public water supplies, work for which they have no particular expertise and in which their guns will be of little use. Why didn't the government send a team of hydraulic engineers? And for that matter, why water? Why didn't the government send a team of doctors from the Atomic Victims Hospital in Hiroshima to study the damage done by depleted uranium, a field where Japan could make a real contribution. The answer seems to be twofold. First, the government's aim is not to aid Iraq, but rather to aid the U.S. By sending armed SDF troops to Iraq, it lends support to the ramshackle (and perhaps collapsing) alliance of countries supporting the U.S. invasion and occupation. Second, the government has another, ulterior, aim: to deliver the final deathblow to Article 9. By sending SDF troops into a war zone, armed with real weapons but without the legal right to use them in military action, the government is forcing the contradiction between the SDF and the Constitution to a head. The odds are that if they stay there long enough, they will come under attack. When that happens, the odds are that they will kill someone, and/or be killed themselves, and/or suffer the "humiliation" of withdrawing where a genuine military organization would stay and fight. The government's gamble is that when this happens, the Japanese public will rise up and say, "Now we understand. Let's get rid of this Constitutional restriction that fetters our poor SDF troops!" That's why some people are saying that the government is sending the SDF to Iraq in order to get some of them killed. My own view is that its aim is to make them into genuine killers. But of course it is a gamble, for the effect on public opinion might be quite the opposite, and trigger a new movement to reestablish the Peace Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

The Radicalism of Article 9
Should this occur, it would be a deeply radical change. For the Japanese Peace Constitution, while it has had an important effect on postwar Japanese politics and society, has never been fully implemented. Article 9, taken together with the Constitution's Preamble, amounts to a radically new strategy for protecting Japan's national security. National security is to be protected not by use or threat of military force, but through a positive diplomacy of peace. Japan is to join with "peace-loving peoples of the world" (which is by no means everybody) and work to create an international environment in which wars do not break out. This of course goes against common sense political thinking. To mainstream political scientists, almost all of whom agree with Max Weber that "the monopoly of legitimate violence" is the very essence and definition of the state, the idea is simply outrageous. But we have to remember that this common-sense political thinking brought us the madness of the 20th Century, in which the state used its right of legitimate violence to kill more than 200 million people. No doubt, the experiment proposed in the Japanese Peace Constitution would be risky, and might fail; in international politics there are no guarantees. But attempting to protect a nation's security with military force is worse than risky, it is deadly dangerous. The stronger your military gets, the greater the temptation to send it off on foreign adventures which can end in catastrophe, as the Japanese (at least the older generation) learned from direct experience, as the Americans ought to have learned from the Vietnam war, and as they are relearning now.

Moreover, those who believe that a military establishment brings safety to a people forget that the primary target of most military establishments is the domestic population. Of the more than 200 million people killed by the state in the 20th Century, most were civilians of course, and more than half were not foreigners, but their own people. Even today, as a glance at any daily newspaper will confirm, most of the wars going on in the world are between the state and its people, or some part of its people, in places where the state's "monopoly of legitimate violence" has not yet been established.

Is the Peace Constitution Hypocritical?
Be that as it may, the adventure proposed in the Japanese Constitution has never been tried. When the Constitution was first promulgated Japan was still under occupation by the U.S. military. When Japan finally regained its independence in 1952, it had to accept, as a condition of the Peace Treaty, the Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Treaty, which allowed the U.S. to keep its military bases on Japanese soil. Thus the Peace Constitution was infused with an element of hypocrisy from the beginning. Japan would be a "peaceful country," but it would not try the experiment of protecting its security with diplomacy alone. Rather it would use the accepted method of depending on military power, albeit foreign military power. And after the establishment of the Police Reserve in 1950, which was gradually built up into a large and expensive paramilitary[1]? force, hypocrisy has been piled upon hypocrisy.

But if the combination of the Constitution and the Security Treaty make Japan's foreign policy as a whole hypocritical (what critics call the "free ride" policy), the people who have fought to protect and extend the Constitution are not hypocrites. The movement to protect the Constitution has consistently been opposed to the Security Treaty as well. The situation is actually a kind of unbalanced balance between opposing forces. The governing Liberal Democratic Party has from the beginning wanted to rearm, and has succeeded in building up the SDF in numbers and equipment, but has not succeeded in providing it with the legal right of belligerency which it would need to be a true military. The popular forces supporting the Constitution have not been able to get the U.S. military kicked out of the country or to prevent the buildup of the SDF, but they have so far kept the latter from being used in any wars. Thus though the SDF exists, it remains true that since the end of World War II, no person has been killed or wounded under the authority of the right of belligerency of the Japanese state. Given what Japanese history in the century before that looked like, that is no small achievement.

Preemptive Attack: Aggression
It seems clear enough that this is precisely what the Government hopes to change by sending the SDF into war-torn Iraq. This ugly drama is made uglier still by the fact that the war in which Government hopes to draw First Blood is not a defensive war, but an illegal act of aggression. Many Japanese who support this dispatch have not grasped this, nor have they grasped the degree to which U.S. foreign policy has changed since the election of George W. Bush. This raises an interesting question in international law. Suppose your country signs a mutual defense treaty with another country, and while the treaty is still in effect the other country utterly changes its foreign policy. Suppose, for example, it goes fascist, or embarks on some wild military adventure. Does the treaty still hold? Most of the people in Japan who supported the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty did so in the belief that the U.S. would continue to follow its basic policy principles of containment and deterrence, and would not begin a policy of naked aggression. It seems they believed this so strongly that even now that the U.S. has shifted to a policy of naked aggression, they continue to believe it, which means they don't believe what they read in the newspapers every day. Of course the old U.S. policy principles of containment and deterrence were never honestly followed, and they involved the U.S. in many bloody and unjust wars. And of course there is much continuity between the policies of, say, Clinton and Bush. But there has also been radical change, change not from good to bad, but from bad to worse.

To Discard a National Treasure - For This?
The Japanese government has a Foreign Ministry headed by a Minister of State, but it is not clear that this organ has the capability of generating foreign policy. In effect, when the U.S. made the Security Treaty a condition for ending the Occupation, it meant that sovereignty was returned to Japan in all areas except foreign policy. For so long as U.S. military bases remain in Japan, the most fundamental foreign policy decisions, namely, who are our enemies and who are our friends, are made in Washington D.C. The government defends this dependency by saying it is vital for Japan to avoid becoming isolated from "international society". But in effect, what it means by "international society" is the U.S. The government seems not to have noticed that with its invasion of Iraq the U.S. has become more isolated from international society than at any other time in its history. It has damaged, perhaps mortally, the fragile structure of international law, insulted the United Nations, split the NATO alliance, destroyed its credibility all over the world but especially in the Middle East, and fuelled a cycle of violence that has vastly increased the danger of terrorism everywhere.

If the Japanese government had chosen to abandon its Peace Constitution to enable it to offer support in a genuine war of liberation somewhere, that too would have been a tragedy, but a tragedy with some dignity in it. But for this!

---------------
Endnote
[1]: "Paramilitary" doesn't accurately describe the SDF. But since it is in a category of which it is the only example, and since in Japanese political discourse few people discuss it directly and honestly, no word has been coined to describe it accurately.

C. Douglas Lummis: Was born in San Francisco in 1936. Studied political thought at the University of California at Berkeley. Began working in university education in 1970. Retired in March 2000. Presently lives in Okinawa, doing mostly writing and speaking. His works include Radical Democracy (English version: Cornell UP Japanese version: Iwanami Shoten), Can We Have Prosperity Without Economic Development? [Keizai seicho ga nakereba watashitachi ha yutaka ni narenai darou?] (Heibonsha), The Ideas Peddler [Kangae, urimasu] (Heibonsha), Why Does the U.S. Fight So Many Wars? [Naze amerika ha konnnani senso wo surunoka?] (Shobunsha), and Is Japan Really Going to Junk its Peace Constitution? [Nihon ha, heiwa kenpo wo hontoni suteru no desuka?] (Heibonsha).

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